"I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (5 page)

But the ladies in the car made no such bet with anybody. We’d be stopping along the way for their smoke breaks, and that would slow us down. (Smoking is one vice I never had to confess to the priest when I was a kid. I never got started on tobacco, not even in the war, not even pinned down at Anzio with nothing else to do in a dugout for four months but play cards, pray to God, and smoke. You need your wind in this life.)

Another reason it would take so long is that Russell always had business stops to make along the way whenever or wherever we went together—instructions to give about certain matters, cash to pick up, stuff like that.

On Monday night Irene and I had dinner with Russell, Carrie, and her sister Mary at Brutico’s in Old Forge, Pennsylvania. Russ had special restaurants that met his standards. Otherwise, if he didn’t cook it himself, most of the time he didn’t eat it.

If it weren’t for Russ’s gray hair there’s no way you would know he was in his seventies. He was very spry. He was born in Sicily, but he spoke perfect English. He and Carrie never had any children. Many a time Russ reached up and pinched my cheek and said, “You should’ve been Italian.” He’s the one named me “The Irishman.” Before that they used to call me “Cheech,” which is short for Frank in Italian—Francesco.

After we had our meal, which was something like veal and peppers with spaghetti marinara, a side dish of broccoli rabe, and a nice salad with dressing Russell made in the back, we sat and relaxed with our coffee laced with Sambuca.

Then the owner came over and whispered to Russ. This was before portable phones. Russ had to leave the table to take the call. He came back business-like. He had that smile on his round, craggy face you get when you squint at the sun. He had muscle deterioration in his face that gave him a lazy eye. If you didn’t know him you would think he was blinking or drinking. With his good eye he looked through his wide glasses into my blue eyes.

Russell didn’t say anything at first, like he was trying to think how to say it by studying my eyes. Russell had a voice that crackled like a rattle, but the madder he got the softer Russell talked. He was very soft-spoken that night before my testimonial dinner at Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night when he warned Jimmy to back off from trying to take back the union.

At the table at Brutico’s, Russell was talking so soft I had to lean my extra-large head real close. In a raspy whisper he said, “We got a little change in plans. We’re not leaving tomorrow. We stay put ’til Wednesday morning.”

The news hit me like a mortar shell. They didn’t want me in Detroit Wednesday afternoon at that restaurant. They wanted Jimmy alone.

I stayed bent over close to Russell. Maybe he’d tell me more. You listen. You don’t ask questions. It seemed like it took him a good while. Maybe it just seemed like a long delay to me before he spoke. “Your friend was too late. There’s no need for you and me to meet him on Saturday by the lake.”

Russell Bufalino’s penetrating good eye stayed on mine. I moved back up in my seat. I couldn’t show anything in my face. I couldn’t say a word. That’s not the way it works. The wrong look in my eyes and my house gets painted.

Jimmy warned me to watch myself back in October at the Warwick Hotel in Philly when I tried to tell him what it is. He said, “…watch your ass…you could end up being fair game.” Just yesterday he got done warning me again on the phone that I was too close to him “in some people’s eyes.” I put the coffee and Sambuca up to my nose. The licorice didn’t smell strong enough against the smell of the coffee so I added some Sambuca.

I didn’t have to be told that I better not even think about calling Jimmy when Irene and I got back to the Howard Johnson motel for the night. From this point on, whether it was true or not, I would have to assume that I was being watched. Russell had a piece of that Howard Johnson’s. If I used the phone that night it is quite likely that Irene and I never would have made it out of the parking lot the next morning. I would have gotten what some people thought was coming to me anyway, and poor Irene just would have been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong Irishman.

And there was no way in the world Jimmy could call me. In case the feds were listening, you never said on the phone where you’d be staying when you got to where you were going. There were no cell phones then. Jimmy just wouldn’t get a call from me Tuesday night in Detroit, and that would be that. He would never know why. He’d go alone to his meeting on Wednesday. My little brother and I wouldn’t be there for backup.

I sat there in silence with the ladies talking among themselves about who knows what. They might as well have been on the other side of the bridge over the waterfall in Bill Bufalino’s basement.

I was reviewing things fast. Right after I called Russell that morning about Jimmy calling me, Russell would have called certain important people. He would have told these people about me going to the restaurant with Jimmy and taking my little brother. Right or wrong, the best I could figure at that moment was that these people called Russell and told him they wanted us to stay put for a day so they could get Jimmy alone.

Only before they called Russell they must’ve been reviewing things themselves. All day certain people in New York, Chicago, and Detroit must have been deciding whether or not to let me be there with Jimmy on Wednesday. That way one of the closest Hoffa supporters in America would go to Australia with Jimmy. Whatever secrets Jimmy may have told me after Broadway Eddie’s that night at the Warwick and over the years would die with me. In the end they made the decision to spare me out of respect for Russell. It wouldn’t be the first time Russell saved me from something serious.

I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, if they want you you’re theirs. It’s usually your best friend that walks up to you talking about a football bet and you’re gone. Like Giancana got it frying eggs and sausages in olive oil with an old friend he trusted.

This was the wrong time for me to sound like I was worrying about Jimmy. Still, I couldn’t help myself. Without making it sound like I was trying to save Jimmy, I got right next to Russell’s ear. “The nuclear fallout from the feds.” I tried not to stammer, but I probably was stammering. He was used to it; it was the way I talked since childhood. I wasn’t worried that he might view it as some kind of sign that I was having a problem with this particular matter because I was very loyal to Jimmy and very close to Jimmy and his family. I bowed my head and shook it from side to side. “The nuclear fallout’s going to hit the fan. You know, Jimmy’s got records stashed away in case something unnatural happens to him.”

“Your friend made one threat too many in his life,” Russell shrugged.

“I’m only saying the nuclear fallout’s going to hit the fan when they find his body.”

“There won’t be a body.” Russell went thumb down on the table with his right hand. Russell had lost the thumb and index finger on his left hand when he was young. He moved the thumb he still had around like he was grinding something into the white tablecloth and said, “Dust to dust.”

I leaned back and sipped my Sambuca and coffee. “That’s what it is,” I said. I took another sip, “So, we get it on Wednesday night.”

The old man reached up and pinched my cheek like he knew what was in my heart. “My Irishman, we did all we could for the man. Nobody could tell that man what it is. We get into Detroit together Wednesday night.”

I put my coffee cup down into its saucer, and Russell moved his warm, thick hand to the back of my neck and left it there and whispered, “We’ll drive so far, and we’ll stop for the women someplace. We’ll go do some business.”

Sure, I thought, and nodded. Russell had business all along the route from Kingston to Detroit. We’d drop the women at some roadside diner and go do our business while they smoked and had coffee.

Russell leaned toward me, and I bent down and leaned close to him. He whispered, “There’ll be a pilot waiting. You take a quick fly over the lake and do a little errand in Detroit. Then you fly back. Pick the women up. They won’t even notice we’re gone. Then we take our time. Nice, leisurely drive the rest of the way to Detroit. The scenic route. We’re in no hurry. That’s what it is.”
”

 
chapter three
 

Get Yourself Another Punching Bag

“
What were the twists and turns that brought me to that exact moment in a small Italian restaurant in a coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, where I listened carefully to whispered orders? Orders I had to follow for the part I had to play in the plot against my friend Jimmy Hoffa.

I wasn’t born into that Mafia way of life like the young Italians were, who came out of places like Brooklyn, Detroit, and Chicago. I was Irish Catholic from Philadelphia, and before I came home from the war I never did anything really wrong, not even a pinch for disorderly conduct.

I was born into some rough times, not just for the Irish, but for everybody. They say the Depression started when I was nine years old in 1929, but as far as I’m concerned our family
never
had any money. Nobody else’s family did either.

My first taste of enemy fire came from farmers in New Jersey when I was a young lad. Philadelphia sits across the wide Delaware River from Camden, New Jersey. Both cities got their start as ocean-going port towns and are connected by the Walt Whitman Bridge. It’s hard to believe now, when you drive out past Camden and you see that there’s hardly any free land for so much as a tiny Victory garden, that in the Roaring Twenties when I was a kid it was all flat, fenced-in farmland. New Jersey was the sticks compared to Philadelphia. It was real peaceful out there.

My father, Tom Sheeran, would borrow a big old clumsy car with a running board. He’d drive me out to the farm fields outside of Camden from the time I was very little. He’d drop me off where the Camden Airport is now so I could do a little harvesting.

We’d go in the early evening when it was still light enough to see, but getting dark. That’s the time of day when the farmers were expecting to have their own dinner. I would climb over the farmer’s fence and toss back to my father samples of the crop I was harvesting. It could be ears of corn or tomatoes or whatever was in season. That’s what you had to do to get by and put food on the table.

But the farmers weren’t any too happy with our ideas about sharing in nature’s bounty. Some nights they’d be waiting for us with shotguns. Some farmer would chase me, and I’d jump over the fence and get hit in the butt with birdshot.

One of my earliest childhood memories is getting birdshot picked out of my backside by my mother, Mary. My mother would say, “Tom, how come I’m always picking this stuff out of Francis’s behind?” My father, who always called her Mame, would say, “Because the boy doesn’t run fast enough, Mame.”

I get my size from my mother’s Swedish side of the family. Her father was a miner and a railroad worker in Sweden. Her brother was a doctor in Philadelphia, Dr. Hansen. My mother was about 5'10" and never weighed less than 200 pounds. She ate a quart of ice cream every day. I used to go down to the ice-cream parlor for her every night. You would bring your own bowl and they would give you so many dips of ice cream. They knew to expect me. My mother loved to cook and make all her own bread. I can still smell the aroma of her roast pork, sauerkraut, and potatoes simmering on the coal stove. My mother was a very quiet woman. I think she showed her love for us through her cooking.

My folks got married very late in life for those days. My mother was forty-two when they had me, their first kid, and my father was forty-three. They had us a year apart. My brother was thirteen months younger than me, and my sister was thirteen months younger than him. We were what they used to call Irish twins because the Catholic Irish popped those babies out so close together.